Iterations
by Cantare
Summary: This is a nonstory of a man who cannot extract a purpose from the events he narrates and thus inject meaning into his words. Here is a beginning without an end.
1. This is not a story

A/N: I believe it is good for authors to have at least one "brain dump." A piece of writing that has no consequence, hence a dumping ground for thoughts and an outlet for stress. Comments/questions/criticisms are all appreciated.

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This is not a story.

A story has a beginning, a point at which a plot is born, sometimes quite messily and sometimes in a rather sterile fashion, and starts on the often tortuous, seldom straightforward path of a maturing process. A story also has an end. This word bears two meanings of unequal significance: the conclusion of the plot, and a purpose. The former is quite simple; the plot concludes when the words on the page are no more. The latter, on the other hand, is the essence of a story. Purpose is the lifeblood that pulses through every word, no matter how short or trivial. A story has a reason to be told. Without an end in this sense, it is a lifeless pile of words.

This is not a story, though the man who narrates it would like to think that it is, because of the crucial thing it lacks. It may have a beginning and an end in the first sense of the word, but it has no reason to come alive.

This is a long, largely mundane, often incoherent, at times sordid compilation of sentences detailing a man's life. Try as he might, he cannot extract a purpose from the events he narrates and thus inject meaning into his words. The reader may be more successful at that; to each his own.

On the next page is a beginning without an end.


	2. Listen

She's wearing the dress I bought for her. I smile and let my eyes leave her face, trail downward a bit. This is politeness. The rules are different with women you've been intimate with.

This is politeness because, to be honest, the dress doesn't look all that good on her. Either I have poor taste, or a few months with her have worn away the gloss of her appeal.

The wine feels pleasant swirling down my throat. It's allowing me forget the details of yesterday's botched meeting with the board and next week's convention in London. I'm not very well prepared these days. Yes, the company's image may suffer, but I'm starting to wonder if I should care. Okay, this is the wine talking. I know I do care, in some faraway Monday as the elevator chimes Floor 35 and I step out in my newly polished shoes and a double shot of espresso in my system.

But right now there are just a few glasses of house wine and a familiar woman here with me; the scope of my life is narrow.

She's been talking at me but I didn't catch the beginning of her story. She's predictable enough, though. Something about her friend's new job at the Satin club downtown. I have to wonder how many of her friends are dancers. Wonder what they look like.

"You're not listening again."

I smile easily. I don't think she knows how much I hate that pout she's making. She looks like my sister.

"You told me Selena's at Satin now and doesn't feel safe there." I can usually sum up several minutes of her chatter in a sentence or two. She knows how to fill silence. I shrug. "She should get another job."

The pout's not going away. "She can't really afford to. Not all of us are like you."

I laugh. I don't feel bitter, because at least she's beautiful. But somehow it seems every woman I end up with defines me by my wallet…which is natural, I suppose.

"I can't exactly get another job, Dani. It's a family business, you know that."

"You have a sister."

I pause for a second and kind of hope she knows how stupid I think she is, but because she's stupid she probably doesn't know.

"I don't think you've met her, have you."

"No."

"She's not interested in business."

"Oh."

I've let my food grow cold. I'm not that hungry tonight. For a second I remember how hungry I used to be when I first started on the job. The secretaries were appalled at how much I usually ordered for lunch. But after a few years without serious training, I'd say my appetite has gone down to a semi-normal level.

She talks at me some more and I listen. I'm actually considering when she'll ask to break it off. It should be sometime soon, because she's enjoyed enough of my money and I know she's not as captivated with my personality as she pretends to be. She's a fairly tolerable person when she doesn't talk too much about herself, and she's beautiful. All in all it's been a fair exchange.

I always make it clear in the beginning that I'm not looking to get married. So I usually get along quite well with my exes because we establish a sort of mutual understanding early on. It's much cleaner that way, fewer burdens for both of us.

"What are you thinking?" she asks me. She looks suspicious. I guess I look bored.

_We should be over by now._

"We should get going," is my answer. It is kind of late.

"It's Saturday night," she says pointedly.

"There's nothing worth doing around here."

She smiles in response to that. I think she's trying to look seductive, but it's not working.

"Except you. Is that what you want me to say?"

Her smile widens and she even blushes. Cute.

But a turn-off.

"Carl will send you home. Or wherever you want to go. But I'm going to take a walk, I need some time alone." My words are rather abrupt. She's probably offended that I don't want her, even when she's wearing the dress I bought her.

I'm already texting my driver. She's not protesting at least. Maybe she's remembering that the dress I bought her is worth a few months of her salary.

"I guess I'll see you next week," she says, not hiding her disappointment.

"Call me."

I walk outside and through the parking lot. I think Carl is puzzled that I'm just going off on my own. Another one of his boss' strange whims, he must be thinking. At least I'm not flying away this time. I've done that a few times when we were stuck in traffic on the way to important meetings.

It's autumn. The air's cold, beginning to bite at my skin. I should have worn something warmer.

I have to smile at myself. Funny how I've forgotten so many of my old habits. I don't have to put on extra clothes to feel warm. I just have to kick up my ki level. But I don't often use ki anymore, so I usually don't realize that I can.

The streets are emptier than they should be on a Saturday night. I would wonder why, but I've realized that sometimes there simply isn't a reason for things that are out of place. Maybe it's just in our minds, the concept that something can be out of place. In reality, maybe things just either are, or aren't.

This is probably still the wine talking.

I don't usually philosophize much. I just live. I used to wonder a lot if this kind of life could satisfy me. By "this kind of life," I mean what you think I mean. Power and wealth. Working at the top of the system and knowing I can have whatever I want. My fear back then was that I'd be an even bigger sellout to the system than the guys who start at the very bottom. Those days of youthful idealism are gone. I'm just a man still, but a man with a lot more to his name than others. I can't say I'm happy, but happiness and satisfaction aren't the same. Satisfaction by definition is enough.

I step off the curb as the pedestrian light turns green. The car just rounding the corner keeps going even though the driver must have seen me by now. It doesn't break my stride.

It avoids hitting me by maybe an inch. The breeze from its passing lifts the bottom of my coat. A quickly fading voice shouts an expletive in my direction.

This is how I know I'm just a man. At least once a week I'm reminded. Or rather I have to remind myself. So I don't slow down on Saturday nights when I'm crossing the road, even when a driver who is most likely drunk is carelessly swerving into my path.

I've never actually been hit when I do this, though. And when I walk through the more dangerous parts of the city, I've never been mugged. Must be luck. Not that getting hit by a car or a fist would seriously hurt.

The complete lack of violence feels a bit strange at times. The yearning for a physical challenge, any sort of violence, even pain, is wired into my genes. Half of them, at least. But with each year that passes, I guess nature loses to nurture. Or habit. No one's ever nurtured me. The word itself sounds disgusting to me, like a repulsively soft, skinless newborn rodent.

This must be my nature speaking. I hate weak things.

All the lights on this long avenue are lit. The sidewalks are straight and the trees are all about the same height. The sky is dark and the stars are clearly visible. What else is worth describing…the buildings are just…buildings. I see them every day and hardly notice them anymore.

But I notice the lights because last year when there was a citywide blackout for three days, the mayor turned to me. Capsule Corporation redesigned the power grid of the city. Not our specialty, but we're flexible. My mother was proud of the company she had helped build into a global empire, naturally. My father didn't give a shit and told her to shut up about it, naturally.

I'm going to keep walking because there isn't anything else I can think of doing. There's probably something waiting for me to do in my inbox, but for now I'm just wandering.


	3. Mediocre

It's been said that heroes are made, not born.

Heroism usually doesn't go beyond one generation because it's not an inborn trait, unlike the penchant for violence wired into my genes. The sons and daughters of heroes often end up as mediocre people of average intelligence, prone to bouts of depression and insecurity because of the enormous shadow their parent(s) cast on them.

I've never had any interest in heroism, but I think sometimes I get depressed about living in the shadow of my own expectations. I look at all the things that I have and own and realize I didn't earn much of anything by myself. My mom passed a decent percentage of her IQ onto me, my dad passed on his strength, both of them passed on their good looks. In terms of status and wealth, it was destined from the beginning that I take over the corporation once I was old enough because my mom had been itching to leave the job for years (She's not the type who likes office work. Or any kind of work, period). I'll be inheriting the Briefs family estate from my grandfather one day. That includes several bank accounts and smaller companies whose individual worth surpasses the GDP of a bunch of nations.

Because of all that, I feel mediocre.

Sometimes when I'm lying awake in bed, gazing at the ceiling, I toy with the thought of throwing it all away and starting over, to try to make it to the top again on my own, just to prove myself.

But that's completely absurd, of course. There's no way I could cast it all off. It would have to entail becoming an anonymous face, a no-name, not just giving away my possessions. If I simply left my job, I would still be rich and well known, labeled as the former CEO of Capsule Corporation. If I gave away my money to charity, I would become even better known.

The only thing I could do is to leave Earth and resettle on another planet. Not something that attracts me at the moment. Anyway, if it became known that I'm the son of Prince Vegeta, former destroyer of worlds and exterminator of species, it'd all be over. It'd secure me a permanent spot at the very bottom of any society, most likely in a maximum security prison.

Where am I going with this?

I'm just mediocre because I was born at the top. There's nowhere higher to climb.

But I've never considered heroism either. Heroism wouldn't entail giving up money or possessions. It would have to involve some drastic, insane maneuver or series of maneuvers that clearly went against logic, all for the sake of humanity, or something like that. That kind of stuff is not my thing. Intellect and violence run in my blood. Not reckless idealism.

I leave that to my best friend's father. Hmm. Funny that that's how I think of his relation to me nowadays. When I was little, he was my father's enemy first and foremost.

My father had a hero moment once. He killed himself for the sake of the Earth. I think. Or maybe for my mom and me, but that would have been so unlike him. He never really talked about it afterwards, and I didn't bother asking. Goes to show how much I cared about heroism even at that age.

Where am I right now in this state of silent philosophical banter? I'm in the elevator on the way to the 35th floor.


	4. Evil

The only class in school that I ever struggled with was history.

Not that it was difficult to pass; all academic study came as easily to me as it did to my mother, who finished university in two years and held two PhDs by age 25.

But it distinctly bothered me whenever we discussed war history. Particularly the Second World War.

In middle school, my history teacher gave us a rather bizarre assignment. He was good at coming up with assignments that restless adolescents would enjoy or at least find tolerable. We were reading excerpts from Dante's Inferno at the time, that brilliant epic that made me realize humans were much better at coming up with eternal punishments than the inept demons that currently keep hell running, according to Piccolo. Our assignment was to think of three historical figures that deserved to spend eternity in some layer of hell and make up punishments for them as relevant to their sins in life.

There was one prohibition: we could not choose Hitler.

My teacher found that every year he had assigned this project, the entire class without fail would think of Hitler as the first of the three. I suppose it became boring for him to read after a while. Hitler being burned in a furnace. Hitler being forced to dig trenches and shiver in the cold, dressed in mere rags. Hitler seeing his loved ones torn away from him over and over again and subjected to the tortures to which he had subjected millions of others.

I didn't need that prohibition. The first person I thought of wasn't Hitler.

It was my father.

And it bothered me greatly. I'd never really come to terms with the fact that my father was a mass murderer and probably a rapist, torturer, and who knows what else on the side. I'd found out from a spattering of sources, usually the conversations between one of the Sons and Piccolo, Krillin, or Yamucha. They'd always stop and change the topic when they noticed me listening, but the air of embarrassment would linger.

Even from the little information I had heard, I knew that if my father ever met Hitler in hell, he could rightfully laugh in his face. At least Hitler hadn't killed that many people with his bare hands. He had given orders to his underlings and probably signed some papers, and six million had been exterminated that way. My father had killed at least a hundred billion if not more, often in batches of several billion with a single ki blast from his hand.

So it bothered me when I went home from school that day and tried to figure out who my three historical 'martyrs' of evil would be. I couldn't get over the fact that no human in history could ever compare with my father. But…he couldn't be that evil anymore. He had a wife and a child—me. He didn't kill people now. He had even defended the planet a few times and given his life for it. Sometimes he still beat me to within an inch of my life, but I thought that was normal. Not only because I was used to it, but because that violent part of my nature expected it, even wanted it, so that I could grow stronger.

My dad was evil. I kept thinking about it as I did my other homework. At the time I wasn't sure whether to say he 'had been' evil and no longer was…which would mean his actions determined whether he qualified as evil, or if he still was evil, just intrinsically. It was a hard philosophical issue to grapple with as a twelve year-old.

I watched him every day after I got that assignment. I realized that if anyone in my class had known about his past, then my teacher would have had to make a new prohibition: no writing about Trunks' dad. Still, I wanted to know the status of his soul, so to speak, at the present time. My naïve mind thought I could figure it out through observation, like watching a lab rat.

Wrong.

My father figured out something was up. I supposed I should have been flattered; he spoke to me so little most of the time that I thought he was oblivious to everything in my life. He probably didn't even know my age, let alone what grade I was in.

But he sensed me watching him, probably because it fell within the realm of his warrior instincts. He must have felt me watching him not as a scientist watching a lab rat but as an enemy scrutinizing someone he wants to kill.

He made me train with him one night in the middle of studying for a test. It was painful, as usual. I tried my best, but of course my thoughts were mostly centered on watching the way his mind worked, not his movements as he gave me a sound beating.

He broke my leg, maybe by accident, but I didn't care at the moment. I cursed at him before I could stop myself. Then I froze, knowing what that would earn me.

He laughed instead, to my surprise. He laughed and sat down beside me, and made some remark about how his weakling half-human brat was finally showing some Saiyan. The next thing he said to me threw me off even more.

"It's a bit early for you to have patricidal thoughts."

He took my silence to mean my vocabulary wasn't expansive enough yet to understand the word he had used.

But I understood every word in that sentence perfectly; I was my mother's son, after all. I was silent because I had no idea he would have interpreted my observing him as some kind of desire to kill him.

"Let me rephrase that in simpler words for your limited intelligence," he said disdainfully. "Why do you want to kill me?"

I told him I didn't. The thought had never crossed my mind.

"You're lying."

I wasn't.

He shook his head. "Every Saiyan child is instinctually driven to kill his sire at some point during his coming of age. Usually on the cusp of adulthood. You seem to be an early bloomer."

My response to that soured his mood. I wasn't fully Saiyan.

"Of course," he mused darkly. "Of course…that's why Kakarott's brats haven't tried to kill him either. The human taint."

Questions regarding the nature of evil were spinning in my head again. I had no idea that Saiyans were supposed to kill their parents. Or rather, that the desire to do so was ingrained in their genes.

"So then why have you been watching me, boy? Why the sudden fixation?" he asked curiously.

I did something he probably didn't expect. I told him the truth.

He laughed for a long time. My leg throbbed, and I think he had forgotten about it. Or maybe he just didn't care. He had sustained much worse injuries and had continued fighting, so he probably figured his son, half-human or not, could put up with a single broken bone.

"So you want to see if I make the cut, hm?" he said in amusement. "If I'm really as evil as the humans say?"

I told him I didn't think he was evil anymore, because he had stopped hurting and killing people. His crimes were in the past, and he had made up for them by sacrificing his life for the Earth.

He shook his head again. "You are lying. And your reasoning is irrelevant."

He saw through my words; I didn't actually know whether he was still evil. I definitely didn't think he was good, in any case.

"You can write about me for your useless class if you want," he said easily. I looked surprised. "I doubt your human teacher would believe you if you described my origins and what I've done to merit eternal punishment, but it's your call. There is just one condition—you must write about yourself as well."

I had been keeping up with him so far but was totally lost at that point.

"You think evil is defined by actions? Only in part, and only as a manifestation of the will. Why do people commit crimes in the first place? Evil crimes must be conceived and decided upon first. I have stopped killing. Does that mean I have stopped thinking about killing?"

I swallowed. My mind was working again, as fast as it always did, and the implications of his questions were branching out before me.

He hadn't stopped thinking about killing. That led me to question how often he thought about it still. Several times a day? Whenever he got angry? Or whenever he saw another living, breathing being? Was that how a Saiyan lived? The way that he expected me to live?

Hell, he expected me to want to kill him!

Was being Saiyan equivalent to being evil?

But what did that make me? I was a half-blood.

"What are you watching me for? To see if I follow through on any violent inclinations? If I secretly murder humans when no one's looking?" he said with a smile. "I am often tempted. Humans are such annoyances most of the time."

Then he turned the conversation toward me.

"Don't waste your time observing me, Trunks. Observe yourself. You'll see why."

He clapped me on the back as he left me in the gravity room. "Break a leg, son."


	5. Sanctuary

This is my church.

There is never anyone here but me. I stumbled across it a while ago on one of my long aimless flights. I glanced down randomly at the empty dirt road and patches of half-forest below me, and saw the rust and crumbling gray of the roof, feebly entwined with weeds and creeping vines.

I flew past it and kept going for five minutes before turning back. There was no real reason, it was just a spur of the moment decision. An abandoned building in the middle of an abandoned part of the country. Why bother?

I landed on a relatively weedless patch of ground, the surrounding area completely silent.

The building in front of me used to be a warehouse. I had been on enough superfluous managerial trips to various Capsule Corp manufacturing and storage buildings to tell from its appearance, though the inside of it had been gutted long before. The entrance, big enough for trucks to enter, was wide open, the door missing. The walls were lined with empty, crooked wooden shelves, some snapped in several places. The floor was carpeted with dust and garbage, large stains of age plastered across it. Cracked lights that probably didn't meet national standards anymore hung from a high ceiling that slanted slightly upward in the middle.

As I ran a hand across the outside wall, a fine layer of dirt accumulating beneath my fingernails, I had the distinct thought that the warehouse looked like a corpse lying on its chest with its mouth wide open. The gaping entrance with its missing door appeared all too human to me. Its decrepit state added to the effect.

My mind works in strange ways.

I walked inside, intrigued. I stood in the middle of that dead house, my shoes brimmed with dust and whatever else had accumulated in here. I looked up at the ceiling, wondering if the broken glass in the lights would ever fall from its suspended state, as if it could choose to humor me, its only visitor in God knows how long of a time, and shatter on the floor in my presence.

We all tend to flatter ourselves in such situations. We are tempted to think things that haven't changed for years, months, weeks, or even hours might suddenly change during that one month, week, hour, or minute that we notice them and are actively watching, searching for that spark of nature-intended coincidence in our surroundings. The gambler who watches a coin flip or a card flip from the dealer's hand, demanding and pleading silently that because he is watching with piercing intent and self-absorbed prayers, the tool of the house will be flattered by his attention and meet his expectations. The student who sits in a room with dozens of others on (insert name of standardized test) day, staring at the innocuous cover of the unopened test booklet the proctor has placed on the desk in front of him; unable to see its contents, he imagines a blank sheaf to be written by his will, _let 'erudite,' 'viscous,' 'somnambulate,' be in there somewhere because I chiseled their definitions into my mind; discrete probability problems, don't show, please don't show. _

I smiled at myself that time. The lights didn't fall the day of my first visit, and not a single piece of broken glass has moved. Nothing has changed except the vines growing along the outside walls.

This is my church, my sanctuary. Because it doesn't change for me. Nothing changes, nothing moves. Nothing recognizes me or acknowledges my presence.

Most people go to church or some other place of worship to be acknowledged by their God. Of course they say they go to acknowledge and worship God. But of course the real reason is they're selfish and needy. They want to be known, told they're worthy, that their lives aren't just a wasteful speck in the giant black abyss that is the universe. Who could better reassure them of that than the creator of it all?

But when I come here, it's yet another reminder than I am just a man. I don't want to be recognized, praised, fawned over, criticized, politically manipulated. I come here for the welcoming silence that only death and indifference bring.

I'm standing here now, just standing still. The broken bulbs hanging above me are the stained glass of this church, except they weren't purposely fractionalized. The doorless entrance is the proper entrance to a house of worship; nothing bars the way. I am free to enter and leave as I wish, and I can see the inside just as clearly from the outside as I can from the inside, and vice versa. The dusty shelves lining the walls are empty; there are no texts, just empty spaces telling me to think.

When I entered grade school, I started to think about heaven and hell a lot, and which one I would go to. What exactly did one have to do in order to get to heaven? (If it included listening to my mom and obeying school rules, I was already doomed.) What kind of tortures awaited the damned in hell?

Then I died and found out what the afterlife is like—when Majin Buu incinerated the Earth, I was one of the many billions that went with it.

I guess you could say that my faith, or my ability to believe in any religion, died that day. I was eight years old.

Faith isn't faith if you already know what's coming; this is the conclusion I have come to. For me to have faith now would be akin to asserting belief in a mathematical formula or the hardness of the floor beneath my feet. Heaven and hell are there, their existence is fact; I've been to the former, and I was sorely disappointed. I have a feeling that when I die again, I'll end up in the other place.

I'll have to make sure that those bureaucratic demons in hell never get a hold of those essays from my history class in junior high. I don't want them getting any ideas.

Now here's another thought, laced with my typical arrogance. I think I'd do a good job of redesigning heaven and hell. Maybe I'd even add a third place. Not purgatory, that's been done already. I just want to break that overused dichotomous paradigm. Why are there only two places? Why not more? Are human (and divine) minds so narrow?

Or maybe, instead of expanding the otherworldly real estate, so to speak, I'd try building a road. I redesigned the power grid of the capital. Building a road should be a cinch. The fact that it'd have to be vertically oriented might be a challenge. Maybe an elevator then.

The sky's growing dark outside and my feet are starting to ache from just standing here, signs that this worship service is over. I leave the warehouse without looking back. I guess you could say I have faith that it'll still be here whenever I decide to return.


	6. Mother's Day

_Author's Note: I apologize for my long absence from the DBZ fandom. Consacra is long overdue for an update, I know. For many reasons including my obsession with another fandom, I haven't been working on it. However, I will continue it for sure. I just wanted to update_ something _in my DBZ writing today, just to make up for how long I've been gone. Hope you enjoy._

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A car. A vacation home. A new fashion line. A personalized supercomputer.

Ah, choices.

There's only one day of the year where my status as the richest person in the world doesn't matter. Because I have to buy something for the woman who held that title before me.

Mother's Day.

In elementary school, I gave her crappy poetry and art, except in fifth grade, when I built her a model plane. She kissed and hugged me as usual, said she was proud of me for inheriting her brains. She said that a lot, and I don't know if she ever realized how much of a contradiction that statement was on multiple levels. I didn't do anything to earn her genes. Why was she proud? And if she was really so smart, how come she never figured out that her pride was pointless?

And fake, come to think of it. The next day when I came home from school, I saw my grandma flying the plane in the backyard and having the time of her life (now I'd understand if my mom were proud that she _didn't _inherit my grandma's brains). Suffice it to say, my mother has the shortest attention span of anyone I know, except when she's working on one of her impossibly advanced machines that she calls her "babies." Funny, she used to call me that, too.

She also has the shortest streak of gratitude of anyone I know. I guess that's what happens when you're the second generation of self-starter wealth. My grandpa is the most normal person in my family, because he actually grew up poor. He was born to a mechanic and a seamstress. He learned to cobble together machines in his garage and kept at it until he invented the now ubiquitous capsule™ that made him and his descendants richer than God. (That's not blasphemy; Jesus was poor.)

My mother grew up with all the privileges and power that I have, but she's female. That makes a world of a difference, I'm certain. You just have to look at the difference between me and my sister. Same parents, same upbringing, same environment, and look how she turned out.

Sometimes I wonder how she even got it in her head that she could be a mother. It's a touchy subject for my father, actually. I really don't think he intended to be a dad, ever. I think that my birth caused them to split up, though I was too young back then to remember that my father wasn't there. That's another thing that bothers me about her. I guess I could understand if her biological clock or Dende slapped her with a maternal instinct in her thirties, but why the hell did she pick my father to sire her child? I think you could make a documentary out of it – the surefire recipe for a perfectly dysfunctional family.

Ah, Mother.

I've resorted to looking at gift suggestion websites. I have completely run out of ideas for attempts to please her. She would be sorely disappointed if she saw me here, huddled in front of my computer at midnight a few days before her wretched holiday, having just missed the express delivery period for online orders. Maybe inherited brains have an expiry date after all.

What can I get her that she can't get for herself, anyway? Or rather, what can I get her that she doesn't already own in at least three editions, copies, or patents?

_Gift idea #73: plastic surgery_.

I don't even dare to laugh.

_Gift idea #85: a home-cooked meal._

Do I want to kill her? Her inheritance is slightly tempting, but no. Saiyans are supposed to kill their fathers, not their mothers, anyway.

And now I'm looking at the long sidebar where they actually try to categorize mothers for lazy, barely filial children like me. Hostess Mom? Pampered Mom? Lesbian Mom – what the hell? Crafty Mom – ha ha, the double meanings there.

Okay, Gadget Mom seems to fit the best, though I really wish there were a Richest Mom in the World category just to make things easier.

Oh, but there's a Proud Mom. Just noticed.

Would you look at that. The Proud Mom category is full of self-aggrandizing gifts like personalized photo frames and t-shirts that put words in her mouth. "My child loves me." "World's Top Mom."

"Because I said so." Ha. Subtitles for everyday conversation with her.

Maybe I should get her this little misplaced gem. A photo mug that says "We love Daddy." Careless webmasters tick me off.

I need to shower and sleep. This is entirely too much work for a woman who doesn't need anything and doesn't deserve it in the first place.

Okay, I have to take that back. I'm not that cruel or ungrateful of a son. She's given me a lot. She gave me life. She gave me her brains. She gave me the best clothes, best toys, best vacations, best cars. Sent me to the best schools, gave me the keys to the empire of empires. How can I not be thankful?

I am really not trying to be cynical. But I think I've forgotten how.

She gave me my cynicism too.

As I said before, I'm mediocre. She gave me my mediocrity, ironic as it is. She says she's proud of me for inheriting her brains. That's just it. I inherited them. I didn't earn them. I never had the chance to earn anything. She had everything gift-wrapped and dressed on a silver platter for me when I was born. I never had to prove myself to her, because she knew that no matter how dumb I might have turned out, no matter how badly I might have screwed up in life, I would still be fine. My safety net was miles thick, in the form of bank accounts and stock options.

She never expected anything of me, so there were never any expectations for me to surpass, no ways to make her truly proud of me. She just tossed things at my feet, everything a person could ever need or want, whether or not I needed or wanted it. It was all the same to her, no matter the price tag. She had everything, and her son would too. That was all there was to it.

Everything she gave me meant nothing to her.

No other websites are telling me anything useful. I might actually have to resort to calling my sister. But I hope it doesn't have to come to that. I wonder what my father's getting her, or if he's once again allowed this "pointless human holiday" to slip his mind. If he refrains from arguing with her for a day, I think that'll be enough of a gift from him.

This is ridiculous. It's past midnight and I am actually considering texting my sister. More superficially personal than emailing, but less painful than calling.

I think…I think I'll just settle for flowers. It won't matter then if she forgets about them after an hour or so. They die in a few days, anyway; as a strict businessman, I fail to see the value in such things.

Now for the personalized message. You really can do everything online these days.

_Dear Mom,_

_Sorry I haven't kept in touch lately, but I hope these flowers represent how much you mean to me._

_Happy Mother's Day._

_Your son,_

_Trx_


	7. Eulogy

"There are no words. There have never been any words in the course of human history that can adequately capture grief over the passing of a loved one. And so we stand in silence and shock and remembrance, and most importantly, love. Love for the precious, vibrant young woman who so tragically left us. It is the one thing that is stronger than death. And we can find comfort in knowing that it is love that keeps our bond with her alive, that in the place of rest and relief where she now resides, she can still feel our love."

I cover my mouth to prevent any of the weeping mourners from seeing my yawn, passing it off as an attempt to hide a choked sob of my own. I have to be very careful to control that eye-rolling instinct, however, because I wouldn't be able to pass that off as anything but what it is.

Complete, utter boredom at this bullshit ceremony.

"Precious, vibrant young woman," my ass. Translation: Five-dollar uppity whore. It's the truth. She was a whore. Serves her right for taking on a sketchy job in a sketchy part of town. Dani had told me she was a dancer. No one works as purely a dancer in that part of the city.

"Silence and shock"—well, I admit it was shocking that she died this early in her career. She only started a few weeks ago. Guess she had a little too much spunk for the client who killed her. Maybe she didn't agree to a gang bang, or maybe she demanded too much money from the wrong kind of customer. Such are the risks of the trade.

Dani's crying on my shoulder. This is the longest I've ever seen her speechless. Just incoherent blubbering sobs on my suit jacket.

I look around briefly. Selena's parents are up front, of course. They're crying harder than Dani, naturally. So is Selena's younger sister, and even her brother-in-law has some tears in his eyes. I don't know any of the other guests, but there are a lot of them. Enough to fill this mid-sized church.

How many of them know exactly how she died, I wonder. Or what she was doing before she died. Maybe the details will remain a secret for the cops alone. The only thing I know is that she was found several hours after she died, having bled profusely from the expected places and with heavy bruises around her throat. She'd been choked to death and stuffed into the mattress of a hotel room bed.

The ceremony winds on. One of her friends stands up and gives a eulogy. Dani wasn't close enough to her to have to do that. But they were close enough that I expected maybe Dani could have convinced her not to take such a dangerous job. Or at least to quit after she realized it was unsafe. Seriously, how many people start work in a strip club in the slums BEFORE they realize it's unsafe?

I have an intense urge to shrug Dani's face off my shoulder. My suit jacket is thick but even it can't take all that water without eventually soaking through. I pat her head in comfort instead. She holds onto me more tightly then. I smile down at her. She looks at me for a second, seeming to notice that my eyes are completely dry, and cries harder. I'm not sure if that was a disturbed look or if it was just to confirm that I'm playing my part well. The part of the unshakable chivalrous man who holds back his grief for the sake of supporting the weak woman on his arm, and offers his shoulder charitably to her shower of tears.

There's one way in which this funeral isn't cliché. It's not thundering outside. There's no rain at all. No clouds either. Perfect cloudless day. Birds are chirping as we walk across the cemetery grounds. We pass countless graves under the merry sun.

It's interesting to watch people's faces as they see headstone after headstone, some overgrown with moss, some well-groomed. They read names, names that none of them recognize and will ever remember after this day, names that no one in this world probably remembers or cares about anymore. I can see what they're thinking.

The ones who really love Selena are thinking her name's already scratched into that big book of dead people that God keeps up there. Or at least, they hope her name's scratched into that book, and not the other one written in a fiery place on paper that doesn't burn.

The ones who were kind of close to her but are just here for courtesy are thinking something else. They see all these forgotten names and think that's going to be them someday. They'll be similarly forgotten, covered over with earth, neglected and overgrown with weeds. Relatives and friends may visit them sometimes to put a pot of flowers before the stone or to brush off the moss. But after a few years, nothing. Their headstone will just be there to inspire other mourners at other funerals to ponder and fear their own mortality.

Then there's me. I see these names and dates and the Bible verses under them, and I think, where are these guys now? In a mockery of heaven, or a mockery of hell? Are they having fun? Or did they get bored as quickly as I did when I died the first time?

I don't pretend to know the specifics of deliberation of mortal souls. Enma Daio has always been a mystery to me. How that giant lardass bureaucrat can keep doing his tedious desk job for eternity without going mad and stomping on some souls is still a question I ponder at times. But I wonder what he thinks of Selena.

Scratch that, I know what he thinks. Once she finally reaches the front of the queue, he'll see another opportunity to boost the tourism industry in heaven – hot chick who can dance and pleasure the jaded bureaucrats on their paid vacations. Stamp of approval for heaven.

"Trunks," Dani sobs into my shoulder, refusing to look at any more graves. "She's gone. She's really gone."

I continue walking at a steady pace, not looking at her. "Yes, she is."

"I miss her. I miss her so much."

Pity. Selena probably doesn't miss her. Whore can have all the sex she wants in heaven without contracting an STD or feeling "unsafe" afterward. Who the hell needs living friends?

The pastor says a last bit before the coffin goes into the ground. People are either looking away or forcing themselves to watch, catching the last moments of the container bearing her remains before it disappears from sight. I wonder if Selena is watching her own funeral right now.

You know, there's a winning idea. If I'm ever asked by the forces that be to redesign heaven and hell like I've imagined, I'm going to give out complimentary mini TV sets from the back shelves of the Capsule Corp warehouses to all those newly departed souls. They can then tune in to their own funerals while they wait on that long queue before judgment. I can clear my warehouses of useless 90s products while clearing millions of consciences at the same time. Genius idea, Trunks.

I take Dani home after the funeral. I'm a bit surprised she wanted to come with me instead of going off with her friends, the ones who were closer to Selena. I had expected they'd have some kind of therapeutic girl's night with nail painting and facials.

But she picked me instead. As soon as we walk in the door of my house, I can tell she's going to want me bad tonight. It's almost too much for me to handle, especially because she's crying almost all the way through. It's rather uncomfortable because it feels like I'm the one making her cry, like I'm forcing her against her will. Or like I'm a sleaze for taking advantage of her when she's vulnerable and in mourning. But I think this is therapeutic for her.

Afterward she just kind of lies beside me, staring at nothing. I'm halfway asleep when she finally says something.

"I hope the man who killed her rots in hell. The way…the way he killed her…I can't imagine how horrible her last moments must have been."

I nod quietly and let her keep ranting about the murderer and what she'd do to him if she ever met him in person. I agree that Selena's last moments must have been horrible, and I pity the people who found her body. Her killer was obviously a sadistic, uncultured imbecile, given the barbaric way in which he ended her life.

Obviously, choking a person with your bare hands means your fingerprints show bright as day pretty much all over the crime scene. And his DNA is there as well, a copious amount of it, considering how he fucked her inside out beforehand. The man's practically begging for capture and life in prison. Thinking about it bothers me a lot, and I actually fall asleep after Dani does. I guess it's the perfectionism acting up again; I've never murdered anyone in such a reckless fashion.

* * *

_A/N: I am getting back into DBZ little by little. Feedback on this chapter in particular would be greatly appreciated. This "non-story" may be heading in interesting directions._


	8. Hematidrosis

He gets up again and wipes the blood from his face as if it's sweat. To the two of us, that's pretty much what it is.

We're standing at a good distance from each other now, taking a rest between sets.

"Call it a day?"

"Pussy."

He launches himself at me for that comment. I think it's an instinctual reaction. Saiyan reactions are just a hundred times quicker than human ones, so sometimes we can't help but move. I was expecting it, of course, so I block his fists easily and slam a knee into his well-toned abdomen. But I'm not fooled. Our bodies are always in top physical form even if we don't train. I can safely say he's more out of practice than I am, and he knows it as well.

He coughs up some more blood and I manage to sidestep it. It may be as mundane as sweat, but it definitely doesn't wash out as easily. The last thing I need is for my cleaner to freak out and call the cops again because she thinks I killed someone.

I consider telling him he's pathetic, but there's no point. When he stands up again I'm already walking toward the river. He follows behind, his footsteps firm but muffled by the grass.

"How's the family?"

His stride doesn't break, but his steps sound more tedious.

"They're alright. Gohan's been having some problems though."

"Oh?"

"He's having a hard time getting tenured. He might try to find a position somewhere else where he gets treated better."

Gohan and Goten are pretty different. Goten wouldn't take half the crap his older brother puts up with at work. I don't really understand why Gohan is so…soft (I hate that word), at least when it comes to standing up for himself. He used to get off on playing superhero with his harpy of a wife during his high school years, beat up a lot of petty criminals that society wouldn't miss, saved some lives in the process. And he killed Cell and saved the world. How many people can say they've done that? Even I can't. Yet he's still a complete pushover when it comes to his own career and family life. Videl is still the one wearing the pants in their marriage.

"Ask him if I can help in any way."

"Alright."

"There's probably a spot for him somewhere in Capsule Corp. I'll talk to the head of R&D."

"I don't think he wants to work for a corporation."

Goten's walking behind me so he doesn't see me roll my eyes. "Still the anti-establishment tree-hugger, huh. Figures."

"He's just an idealist."

It seems kind of strange when he talks about his older brother like that, almost like he knows more and knows better. Goten was never the academic type, and for most of his life he's lived in Gohan's shadow as the dumb younger sibling. Kind of like Bra in my family, except she actually is that stupid. Our families are both under the impression that Gohan got all the brains, but that's always puzzled me. Which of his parents had any intelligence to begin with? It must be a recessive gene.

"How's Pan?"

"She's a loose cannon. That's the other part of Gohan's life that's been keeping him on edge."

"What did he expect? That every kid with a tyrannical mother would turn out just like him?"

"I don't think Videl's that bad."

"What's your point of reference? Your mother?" I retort. Goten smiles. "I rest my case."

We reach the river, strip, and jump in. The water's cool and clean enough, but I've always hated the feeling of mud under my feet. It feels like decay, and Saiyans aren't attracted to that, only to death.

I'm quick and efficient about cleaning the blood and grime off me, but Goten still likes splashing around like a kid. As I alluded to before, Goten's a lot more mature and intelligent than most people think, but at times he's just an idiot.

I'd say we are probably the most uniquely fucked up people on Earth. Note that I didn't say the most fucked up, just the most exceptional in how fucked up we are. We're not coke addicts, pedophiles, megalomaniacs, chronically depressed, or anything else you might think of. We both have successful careers, steady girlfriends, perfect physiques, and crazy families. Most people who meet us love us. We live like average humans, discounting my wealth and position.

But that's the problem. We're not supposed to be living like average humans, at least not after we're hit with a raging combination of human and Saiyan hormones at puberty.

Half of us will always tell us that we're living wrong. And to follow one half means rejecting the other. So we're caught in a perpetual dilemma, a refutation of self, but it's not like we hear warring voices in our heads or anything. It's hard to describe.

In any case, there are different ways to deal with this. Gohan fully immerses himself in his human side because he's terrified of the other part. He suppresses it when it surfaces it and otherwise avoids it. The Saiyan in him has only awakened a handful of times, i.e. when the world or the galaxy is threatened and he's on messiah duty because his father's out of commission for some reason. That's actually a bad analogy as well; Saiyans make piss-poor messiahs. In the heat of battle, no matter what's at stake, all you really want to do is fight and kill, and you lose yourself in the terrible joy of the moment. You might save the world as a result, but that's not really what you're occupied with when fists are flying and you taste your enemy's blood on your tongue. Perhaps you think Son Goku is an exception, but he's really not. The man has noble intentions, but they undoubtedly fade into the background when the bloodlust takes over. Of course, he's still a hero because he always manages to save the world, and people define heroes primarily by the results of their actions.

My sister escapes the dilemma in a different way. Sex and drugs. That's a gross simplification of her life, but when it comes down to it, those are her twin coping mechanisms. I suppose they're the best substitutes Earth has to offer for the euphoric high of violence. At least she manages to keep her messed up life out of the papers, otherwise I'd have a major PR problem on my hands.

Goten and I, on the other hand, didn't suppress or escape ourselves for most of our lives. We used to meet every other week and beat the shit out of each other. It was relatively easy to arrange when we were in high school and university, but once we graduated and I took the helm at Capsule Corp, it's been difficult. We haven't met regularly in a long time. I can see his frustration just as clearly as he can see mine.

We did a decent number on each other today. But both of us know it's not enough. We can feel it in the deepest fibers of our being. It's not enough.

But it's not practical to keep going. We both have to go to work tomorrow. We can't afford to spend a day in a regen tank, and senzu beans are supposed to be saved for global emergencies.

Sometimes I think about how our fathers must have felt when they got to fight Majin Buu on the planet of the Kais. It was probably one of the happiest days of their lives. How often do you get to go all out against an insanely powerful enemy, no holds barred, no distracting considerations of collateral damage? They got to face a creature that could have destroyed the universe, and they got their rocks off on it.

I levitate upward and dry myself with a flash of ki, and take a set of clean clothes out of a capsule in my pack. Goten's still floating on his back in the water.

"How's Marron?" I ask.

"Alright."

"Still bachelorhood for you?"

"We're taking it slow."

"Could you put up with a tyrannical mother-in-law in addition to what you already have to deal with?"

He looks at me sideways. "If you insult my mother one more time, I'm going to smear mud all over those clothes and then piss on them."

"After you beat the shit out of me?"

"That's a given." His canines gleam white as he smiles.

It's tempting.

I turn away and start picking up the rest of my stuff.

"Just curious. Is Marron part machine like her mother?"

"Trunks, shut up."

"I mean, wouldn't that be a problem during sex—"

This time I don't block his fist, and it fucking hurts as he twists my arm and hurls me at the ground. My shoulder splits open on a sharp rock, and I'm vividly aware of the blood as I launch myself at him. I manage to tackle him to the ground despite taking a dozen bruising punches in the gut, and I shove him onto his back on the muddy slope of the river, pushing him down into that bed of decay. He tries to throw me off but I punch him hard in the face and sink a knee into his stomach, then trap his legs with my own. He suddenly jerks his head forward and slams his forehead into my nose. Blood sprays across his face. He instinctively licks it from his lips, and we both stop.

We're breathing hard and I'm annoyed in a detached way that I have to go home in bloody, soiled clothes. Either that or I can try to fly fast enough that no one sees me naked.

"Fuck you, Trunks."

"I know you want to."

He's silent because he knows I can feel it, even though neither of us swings that way. But I was serious when I said Saiyans get their rocks off in battle. Don't ask me why my dad persists in wearing spandex.

"Get off me."

"You mean get off on me?"

He tries to hit me in the face again but I twist my neck back far enough to avoid him. I laugh as blood drips down from my chin onto his throat. He just rolls his eyes and gives up, waiting for my bout of immaturity to end. My laughter trails off into a grinning sigh.

"We're so sick."

He only shakes his head with a faint smile, his canines gleaming red.


	9. Alienation

My latest joke of a relationship is finally over, and I actually have a veritable reason for it.

Dani brought up the idea of having children. Stopped me right in my tracks as I was walking her home.

I'd excused her stupidity for long enough, but I couldn't overlook plain insanity. For a second I dreaded that she'd secretly gone off the pill and was already pregnant. For a second I even considered killing her. When I get agitated, Saiyan instinct overrides more civilized options.

But she assured me she was just thinking. "Thinking." I heard her out for a few minutes. She'd apparently always wanted to have a baby before she hit age thirty. That was news to me; one of the reasons I had decided to date her in the first place was she didn't want to get married or have a family. I had the sickening revelation that she was like my mother, adamantly set on staying unmarried and unfettered through her young professional life, and then suddenly deciding that her lifelong dream was to rock a cradle.

But what really clinched it was when Dani said she thought I'd make the perfect father; I was caring, rich, compassionate, rich, and patient, and rich.

I told her it was over right then and there, in civil but utterly direct words.

I'd rather not talk about how she reacted. I have a bad feeling that I'm going to need to call my lawyer just for damage control. But it'll pass soon enough. I'm sure with her beauty and the money I lavished on her over the past several months, she'll easily find some other man to father her kid.

Poor kid. I just shudder thinking about it. Dani would make a worse mother than my own. And I'd fare only slightly better than my father.

I wouldn't want anyone to suffer through being my child, or more specifically, having any amount of Saiyan blood in their veins. My own childhood is a case in point.

My first memory is of killing one of the family cats. It's rather fuzzy, but I remember the strange sound the calico made as it squirmed in my chubby hands, trying to claw at me with only three paws. I remember laughing. There was a lot of blood. Soon after that, I heard my grandma screaming as she ran across the living room toward me. I don't remember how the episode ended.

A little after that, I remember that every morning my mother strapped some kind of metal belt around my waist before putting on my diaper. I hated it because it made all my movements slow and sluggish (i.e. normal human speed) and it seemed to drain my energy. But once it was on, I couldn't get it off. When I was three, my father had a serious argument with her about it and ended up leaving the house for several days. Nonetheless, the belt stayed on until the first day of school, when my mother judged I was ready to behave.

At that time I vented my natural penchant for violence on the myriad toys my mother threw together for me. They were mostly robots made of reinforced steel. But she and my grandparents reminded me every day that I wasn't supposed to play rough with actual people because I'd hurt them. I listened to them, but never really understood why. It didn't seem wrong to hurt someone else if I could and felt like it, especially because I didn't mind getting hurt myself.

I endured a full lecture before my first day of kindergarten. Even at that age, my memory was impeccable, and I was bored out of my mind as my mother reiterated everything she had ever said about being nice to other kids, playing gently, and not telling anyone I was Saiyan, even though I was super special and strong and should be proud to be Saiyan. She didn't have to worry; I knew the rules and what I was supposed to do. The first month went by without a hitch.

It was a random day after school in the fall when I broke the rules.

My grandma was late to pick me up for some reason. I ended up waiting outside on the playground with another boy. We were on the seesaw, and I was quickly getting bored. The seesaw was made of wood, not reinforced steel, and I felt confined, as I did every day sitting in a snug, brightly painted classroom with coloring books and toys made out of flimsy plastic.

On a whim, I decided to just sit with my feet planted on the ground and let the boy—I guess he was my friend at the time—hang out on the raised end of the wooden board. He was annoyed and tried to push his weight down so I'd lift off the ground and the inane seesaw movement could continue. I didn't budge an inch. Like a typical child, he started whining that it wasn't fair instead of noticing that something was inherently wrong with the situation.

Just for the hell of it, I refused to move for several minutes, forcing him to sit up there. He was too scared to jump down or try to crawl down the seesaw toward me. I knew what cowardice was; my father had pounded its meaning into my head since he had first started paying attention to me. The kid started begging after he was done whining, a coward through and through. He frankly sickened me. Why hadn't he made any threats? I'd just challenged him, and he wasn't fighting back at all.

I finally let him down because his sniveling got annoying. He jumped back from the seesaw as if I'd detach it and hit him in the face with one end. I had half a mind to do it before he suddenly ran up to me and punched me in the gut.

I laughed. Maybe he wasn't such a coward after all. I remembered my mother's words though—no hurting other people. I'd only broken a minor rule so far, something about being nice to other kids. So I didn't fight back as he hit me again, apparently mad that I hadn't let him down for five minutes.

Then he asked me a question, his reddened face scrunched up in childish anger. "Why'd you do that?"

I remember the exact inflection of his voice; the question stuck with me over the years. It's quite a relevant question, though oftentimes the only answer I can give is a shrug.

But my answer that day surprised me just as much as it surprised my friend. "I'm an alien."

I felt the light-headed flutter of having done something taboo, and it felt good even though I technically hadn't broken a rule; I hadn't told the boy exactly what race of alien I was. And my answer made perfect sense to me, even though the question was _why_, not _how_.

The kid scoffed at me, obviously disbelieving. I said I was serious. He said aliens weren't real. We could have argued forever the way little kids argue until their parents drag them apart or one of them starts crying. But there was no point when I could prove my words right on the spot.

"Give me your hand."

He looked wary, backing away a few steps even as I walked toward him, my own hand extended forward.

"Just give me your hand."

"Why?"

"I'll prove to you that I'm an alien."

"You're stupid! Aliens aren't real!"

I smiled. My mood was lifting for some reason. I realized my hearing had grown sharper all of a sudden; I could make out the scrape of individual leaves against the ground in the breeze, the faint crunch of tires on a gravel driveway down the street. I focused on the boy's face and smelled ripening fear, and I didn't feel bored anymore.

"You can't know aliens aren't real if you don't have proof," I said.

"But I know that aliens aren't real," he retorted, falling back on what I would later recognize as circular reasoning.

I stepped toward him at what I thought was a normal speed, but the look of surprise on his face told me I had moved too fast for him to see. I took one of his hands in my own and before he could even squirm, I snapped his forearm between my thumb and two fingers.

The details following that moment aren't central to my point. The kid went to the hospital, healed in a few months, my mother shelled out a lot of hush money to avoid a lawsuit, and I transferred schools. The belt went back on, and my mother began a draconian mental conditioning program to weed out the Saiyan in me, even as my father continued training me and feeding my hunger for violence.

Years later as I sat in the gravity room nursing a broken leg, I recalled that day in kindergarten. My father's parting words suddenly made sense, when he'd told me to observe myself in order to understand evil.

I think that moment in the gravity room was the beginning of my age of accountability, when I realized the alien part of my blood would always be at war with my humanity, and I would always be a walking moral quandary. Despite my human upbringing, I couldn't deny that I enjoyed pain and violence, especially when I was the one inflicting it. Between kindergarten and seventh grade, I'd just had so much hero lore floating around in my head with meeting Goku and saving the world from Majin Buu that I didn't realize love of pure violence was my true core. Not some silly ideal of heroism or being strong for self-defense. It was love of violence that had led me to tear apart a harmless cat as a toddler and record it as my first memory. And it was love of violence that had led me to snap a kid's arm and smile at the feel of broken bones between my fingers.

We're always the most honest and genuine when we're children, because we don't yet see a reason to hide or deny something about ourselves from ourselves. For human children, that's fine. At worst, a kid will feel perfectly justified stealing another kid's crayon or shoving someone on the playground. For Saiyan children in a human society, it's plainly dangerous. People would say it's abnormal, or alien.

So any child of mine would make a terrible person, even as a quarter-Saiyan. I'm not using the word in too much of a derogatory fashion here; I just mean he'd be terrible by society's standards. Likewise, to be an alien isn't insulting or shameful in my eyes. It's just a fact of life, like one's skin color.

The bad thing about being alien, though, is that alienation inevitably follows.


	10. Absence: Part I

Out of all the ways I've had boring-as-balls board meetings interrupted, what happened this morning definitely tops them all.

I walked into the fancy glass room with the customary double shot of espresso fresh in my system, estimating it'd be effective for an hour at most. I'd probably need another halfway through just to deal with the boredom. It was another perfunctory gathering of men whose real jobs ended as a prerequisite for their current lofty positions. Despite the pointlessness, the agenda was somehow a full page, and some idiot intern had misaligned the margins.

"Mr. Briefs, as Mr. Harun is only on the line for fifteen minutes, may I suggest we discuss item C first for the sake of—"

"Holy shit!"

A dozen balding heads shone under the slanted sunlight as a body plunged straight down past the expansive window on my left. The Doppler effect of the passing scream was like the drive-by blare of an ambulance siren on turbo.

The glass shattered behind me in an expensive insurance shower as I shot down after the guy, cutting from 56 to 40 floors before the dry _what the hell _chuckle registered in my mind. Must have been something in the coffee. Or maybe I'd been more desperate to get out of that meeting than I'd thought.

30…20…

10?

_What the hell? _It came out as a slightly pissed off question the second time as I realized I was ridiculously out of shape. I finally caught the guy at the fourth floor with a bunch of maintenance workers and a window cleaner as witnesses. Almost knocked him unconscious with the whiplash, but it made him stop screaming, at least. Shot back up to 56 just as the third identical statement chimed in my head.

The window wasn't the most expensive thing I'd broken with that thoughtless act of heroism. I'd just weathered a publicity storm with the conspiracy theory that Capsule Corp had been behind the mysterious destruction of the moon all those years ago, before I was even born. Supposedly, our top-secret test of planet-grade nukes had failed in a very obvious way, but we had conveniently shifted the blame to the now rather common excuse of alien activity. I still haven't paid Piccolo the visit he deserves for screwing me over with that.

In any case, I knew this was not going to be fun and had to resist the urge to chuck the guy back out the window once I landed. The dozen corporate fatcats were standing there speechless, half of them fumbling with their smartphones and probably about to dial their lawyers to make sure their asses were covered from the fallout.

As much as he deserved it, I was tactful enough not to set the guy down on broken glass and settled for the boardroom table, feeling a bit of petty satisfaction at sweeping the former Prime Minister's briefcase onto the floor to make space. The man didn't seem to notice. They were all still staring at me as if they'd never seen the glowing CSR reports about the company's environmentally conscious CEO who preferred flying over limo transportation.

"Will someone get a doctor?" I asked calmly.

An hour later the news was on every online feed and TV station of every time zone still touched by daylight. Needless to say, the meeting was indefinitely postponed as the press swarmed Headquarters and I locked myself in the executive bathroom for a few minutes to bang my head against the wall. This was Capsule Corp's first jumper, and that meant the company would have to brace itself for a bandwagon-effect wave of suicides in the coming weeks, and I could look forward to a joy ride through the media meat grinder.

I had to hand it to my PR staff, though. Given how worn out they were from "Moongate," they got on it with impressive efficiency. They chose the best of the array of poor options in front of them – spinning it as an act of unparalleled heroism by their CEO and basically ignoring the suicide part.

I've already made it clear what I think about heroes.

My mother called me with some surprisingly helpful advice on how to handle everything internally, though on the press issue she had little to say other than "let them have their screwfest, they'll tire out eventually." This hadn't exactly happened to her when she was in my position, but she knew how to set up the whole counseling system and red flag mechanisms efficiently and with the least effort on my part. I got off the phone feeling more grateful to her than I could remember for a long time. Should have put more thought into that Mother's Day gift.

One of the things she was adamant about was getting to know the "victim" personally and showing genuine concern for his wellbeing. Basically making friends with the root of all my inconveniences for the next month. As viscerally unsympathetic as I was, I agreed that it was a sensible idea.

So here I am at the hospital, alone in the soundproof VIP ward with my suicidal employee while the reporters crowd the waiting area outside. His neck is in a brace, courtesy of my last-second save; otherwise he's in perfect health.

"You should've let me die," is the first thing he says.

Well, at least we're in agreement about something.

"I'm very sorry," I say instead. A compromise of sorts.

He turns his blank dead gaze toward the wall and sighs. It's obvious that he doesn't want me here and that he'll try to kill himself again as soon as he checks out of this hospital.

"Let me just tell you what you came here to hear. It had nothing to do with you. Not my jerkass boss, not the 80 hour workweeks or any of that crap. So rest assured, I got nothing against Capsule Corp."

"Thank you for the reassurance," I reply with the same coolness. "But I'm still concerned for your wellbeing. I'd like to offer my help if at all possible."

He looks at me for a minute, perhaps wondering if I could sound any less sincere. "I don't want your money."

Translation: he wants to see how much I'll offer without appearing too greedy. The prospect of an endless supply of cash can usually turn a soul back from death, in my experience.

I decide to humor him. "I wasn't implying that you would. But if I can help in any way—"

He laughs bitterly, wincing at the strain on his neck. "Trust me, if this was something that you could fix, I would sue your ass off and make you pay double for it, you son of a bitch." A mellow pause. "Take it from a man who's got nothing to lose. Your mother really was a bitch."

I laugh along with him. He's managed the rare feat of turning from a petty annoyance to a point of interest in the span of a few minutes. I can count on one hand the number of people outside my family who've ever disrespected me to my face. Who knew botched suicides could be so refreshing.

"No disagreement there," I say amiably. I know I shouldn't say too much outside the official sympathy approach but I can't help toeing the line. "Trust me on this, though; death isn't all it's cracked up to be. You're better off alive."

He snorts dismissively, interpreting it as a cynic's attempt at encouragement instead of a statement of truth from experience. Of course. Who in their right mind would believe I'd been through death and back? No one on earth remembers that planetwide resurrection except my family and the rest of the fighters.

"I'm better off alive, huh," he says softly. "So I can feel special that the CEO of Capsule Corp's my only visitor?"

There's a significant pause, broken by someone tapping at the small window in the door. A nurse, clearly harangued by the media hounds. I signal for more time. A flashbulb goes off as I lower my hand, some lucky photographer making his pittance.

I turn back to the guy. Things just got a whole lot more interesting.

"Look, I know you actually don't give a shit about any of this. You're obligated to waltz in here and apologize for nothing, try to make sure the company stock recovers from that ten percent dip by next week. At most you're curious about my reasons."

I don't contradict him, but I'm not jackass enough to smile. It's a pity a guy this sharp wants to kill himself.

"So for your troubles, I'll tell you why," he says, words already empty of emotional investment. "My family's dead. If I had gotten on that plane then I would have gone with them. I had a son and a daughter, five and seven. My wife was."

He stops naturally like that's the end of the sentence, and continues as if changing a TV channel.

"There it is," he says with false cheer. "Don't get me wrong, Mr. Briefs, I appreciate your offer. But unless you can bring my family back from the dead."

He stops there again, naturally.

I do smile then. The irony.


	11. Absence: Part II

_There is just one condition—you must write about yourself as well. _

_Break a leg, son._

It's almost comical how seriously I took my father's advice then as an impressionable twelve year old, still struggling to accept the Saiyan part of me that thrived on violence and pain. I made myself a subject of study, taking note of every time I felt inclined toward an act of selfishness, avarice, narcissism, arrogance, spite, vengeance, jealousy, you name it. In short, I kept a record of my daily "sins," great and small – and of course they were all small, since I hadn't killed anyone or considered killing anyone like my father had and perhaps still did. But after a few days of that, I found that sins have their own way of magnifying themselves once you fixate on them, like a tick growing to a hundred times its size under a microscope. It was plainly uncomfortable to stare giant ticks in the face every time I opened my journal.

Consequently I adjusted my behavior and tried to be a better person, if only to have less to write down each day. Volunteered to take care of my sister so my mom didn't have to hire a sitter, and bit down on my impatience when she cried for no reason and pissed in her diapers right after I changed them. Helped Goten with his homework and quit calling him a retard fifty times a day. Even let him win some sparring sessions so he could feel better about himself, and didn't say anything snide when he taunted me about his undeserved victories.

My experimental good behavior had the annoying side effect of drawing my mother's adoring attention. Those few weeks were the only time in my life when she called me an angel, once in front of my father, who only smiled darkly and said nothing.

Even with her hands full as a middle-aged mother of an infant, she renewed her interest in me and often left Bra at home just to spend time alone with her "growing boy." She confided things in me that she never had before, judging I was mature and understanding enough to tolerate the more embarrassing bits that her own mother probably didn't even know. Never mind that I didn't want to hear any of it. The most salient parts I wish I could wipe from my mind were the three times she almost lost her virginity and the one time she did in the back of a Capsule trailer the summer before she met Goku. It all made sense to her to tell me these things before my father got to me with stories of his infinitely more colorful escapades (which I'm sure were the stuff of snuff films and five shades of deranged by Earth standards), as if he would ever waste fifteen minutes scarring me with that information.

I was thirteen when she started on how she met my father, beyond the abridged version I'd heard repeatedly as a child. It was intriguing to find out what exactly got her to chase after a murderous alien, namely the part about Namek, which seemed to be her favorite. He was so confident. Dangerous. Didn't give a damn about anyone, a personal challenge to her if there ever was one.

Around that torturously mind-numbing time in my thirteenth year, I came across deeper and more inflected ideas of good and evil in my ongoing research. I had envisioned good and evil as forces, vague entities with the color of ki auras floating in some black space in the universe. Or sometimes evil was a living thing, insidious and intentional in expanding its territory, like a predator of sorts. It was locked in a war with good, which for some reason felt even more amorphous to me.

Then I read something that pushed such visuals aside. Evil is the absence of good. A privation, not a substance. An emptiness that does expand, but not in the way of living things. A vacuum that moves in naturally when good is ignored.

The full implications became strikingly clear one afternoon on the way to my grandparents' house. We were on an overpass. The car to our right pulled ahead and made to exit just as a jeep was merging onto the highway at twice the speed it should have been. My mom hit the brakes automatically, her high-pitched shriek filling the air as I threw up a ki shield around both of us. The first car veered sharply toward the edge and broke through the rail, then dropped clean out of sight. The jeep screeched across our path and spun around in the left lane, right into oncoming traffic. An SUV slammed into the driver's side at no less than 80 miles an hour. A body flew from the car over the other side of the highway, limbs splayed like a banana peel, dead before hitting the ground.

My mother pulled over and we looked back. She was wringing her hands, trying to keep them still, curses and prayers spilling from her mouth in indiscriminate fashion.

"Holy shit Trunks are you okay? You're okay right baby? Oh my God that was fucking close, what the fuck just happened—"

"It's not a big deal."

I spoke the words as the realization hit me. She stared at me like the devil had just unpeeled itself Alien-style from an angelic shell.

"We can wish them back with the Dragonballs," I elaborated.

The line of thought unraveled as quickly in her eyes as the blood pooling on the concrete across the highway. We could undo it with a wish, of course. A few days and this unfortunate accident we'd witnessed would be erased and two victims of tragic deaths would be alive. Consciences would be clear, we'd go on living with a breath of relief. I saw her hesitate nonetheless.

"You're right," she said, forcing a smile and patting my head as if groping in the dark for a flashlight. "You're so smart, sweetie. That's what we'll do."

We drove off as the sirens drew near and she glanced constantly in the rearview mirror as if she'd be caught for her cowardice, though she couldn't name exactly what was cowardly about the act. After all, we did gather the Dragonballs and wished the two men back within a week, and erased all public memory and evidence of the event per standard practice.

My father scrutinized us both over dinner the night we returned from the North Pole with the last Dragonball.

"Breaking both legs, aren't you?" was all he said to me on the way out of the kitchen.

A sin of omission is just as wrong as a sin of commission. I had passed the first test of that standard. But now the implications had reared their heads up all at once and stretched across the horizon, as numerous as the obituaries in every newspaper and lists of murders in the police beat and news tickers of disasters halfway across the world and rumors of abuse in neighbors' homes and Nature Channel specials on vanishing species and melting ice caps.

In the instant my father turned his back that night, it was all clear to me, the only path possible and sane and pure cold. I cut across several steps in reaching that destination, logic falling into place as if all the pieces had naturally come assembled as such.

My mother, however, didn't seem to be thinking about it at all. Probably saw it as another routine resurrection in her lifetime monopoly of the greatest game changers in the universe. So I decided to try something.

I waited for the weekend, when she didn't have work as an excuse to cut a conversation short. I woke up early on Sunday and cooked her breakfast, another part of my repertoire of good deeds that had given her so much faith in me. Then I set two magazine articles, both replete with graphic pictures, beside her plate of scrambled egg whites and French toast, and smiled as she walked in.

She kissed me and ruffled my hair, sat down to eat, and paused at the sight of what I had in store for her.

"Trunks, dear, is this for a school report or something?" she said, reaching for the syrup.

"No, I just thought they were interesting."

"Mm-hmm." She chewed thoughtfully as she skimmed one article. A look of sympathy crossed her face. "Oh, only ten years old. That's terrible. This is why I got Capsule Corp involved in medical research all those years ago. So many young kids are suffering…"

The pitying look turned troubled as she stared at the other array of pictures. The aftermath of a terrorist bombing in a crowded marketplace. Journalistic standards kept anything too bloody from print, but the dark red streaks on the sidewalks, the stained gloves and harrowed faces of medics on the scene, and the silent wails of mourners kneeling beside covered stretchers painted a more complete picture of tragedy than corpses could.

"The violence never seems to end, does it," she said sadly. She turned her gaze of compassion on me, brushing back my bangs. "Are you okay, Trunks? Does this bother you?"

"Doesn't it bother you?" I asked.

"Well, yes, of course it does." The half-lie was clear in her voice. "No decent person could ignore the suffering of other people. It's just so sad, what goes on in our world every day."

"We don't have to ignore it, do we?"

"Oh sweetie, I know this is hard to deal with sometimes. But you can't predict these things, much less stop them. There's only so much within our control."

"Really?"

"Yes, there's just no—" She paused, finally realizing that I didn't look sad at all, and she was surely missing something. "Okay, what are you up to, Trunks?"

"This is all within our control, isn't it?" I said.

The smile remained on her face but seemed to lose its luster. "I see. I get what you're asking. The Dragonballs, huh."

I nodded.

"Well, it's a moot point, since they'll be inactive for a year."

"But next year there'll still be millions of kids dying from disease and a few thousand dead from terrorist attacks, not to mention all the other shit that happens around the world."

She flinched, either at the tone of my voice or the fact that I'd cursed. I reminded myself to write that down in my log of sins.

"Trunks, the fact is we can't help everyone," she said, retreating behind her clinical scientist face. "We help who we can, but it's not our responsibility to erase every bad thing that'll ever happen."

"But we haven't helped everyone we could have, have we? We've left the Dragonballs inactive for years. The last time we used them before that car accident was to wish for a better spaceship for Dad to train in space."

She knew she was on the losing side of an argument and didn't keep up the fight. "Alright. So what do you think we should do? Take it upon ourselves to save the world from every little injustice? There are too many problems for the Dragonballs to handle, and they'll just keep springing up."

"So you can look at this little girl's picture," I pointed at the first magazine spread, a rail-thin child who'd lost all her hair, cradled in her mother's lap, "and just walk away, even if you had the Dragonballs with you, active, right now."

She threw up her hands, flustered. "Well when you put it like that—honestly, I don't know what you're getting at. It's a sad story, a very sad story, and maybe, yes, I would help her…ugh, but then you'd just keep asking. It doesn't end, like I said. It just doesn't end."

"So then what about those two people we wished back?" I pressed.

"What about them?" she said, irritation grinding into her tone. "We saved them and gave them a second chance at life with their families."

"Why stop there?" I felt like one of those asshole courtroom drama lawyers at that moment, and found it strangely satisfying to cross-examine the much-acclaimed smartest woman in the world.

"Because we were there. We saw it happen and there's responsibility attached to that. Don't ask me to define it, because you were there too and you were the one who suggested using the Dragonballs."

"I just wanted to see if—"

"You wanted to see if your mother has a heart?" she said, suddenly angry. "Has all this media crap gotten to you too? Let me tell you, it takes more heart than anyone will ever know to run this company and stand every day in front of the world smiling and then come home to keep this family together. I'm not the cold bitch the papers like to paint me as, Trunks, don't you believe it."

It was an unexpected tangent, a brief unveiling of a dark and grotesque painting I hadn't seen before. Without meaning to, I'd unleashed the cloud of furies that haunted my mother.

"I told you why I went to Namek. Learned an entire alien language and piloted an old wreck of a ship I wasn't even sure would make it into space, risked my life dodging Frieza's minions and your psychopath father, got turned into a fucking _frog _all for one reason!" She paused to catch her breath. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. "It was to bring Yamucha back. He's all I cared about. I just wanted him back! It was a completely selfish wish, and completely justified."

It's hard to know what to do in the silence that follows a tirade, especially one that doesn't make sense.

"So, what you're saying is—" I started.

"You use the Dragonballs for people you care about. Not for strangers. Love is selfish, Trunks. That's the plain truth and it's nothing to be ashamed about."

I pretended to consider it a moment, not wanting her to implode. "Okay, but what about—" _Everyone killed by Cell? Everyone Dad killed at the World Martial Arts Tournament? The entire world after Majin Buu's rampage?_ "—those two guys?"

She was going to implode, I knew it. So I answered for her.

"It's about guilt, too, right? Guilt and selfishness."

She sat there and steamed for a long while, closed her eyes to rein in her temper, and opened them again with forced serenity.

"That's right. You're very smart, sweetie. You've won the argument, now will you let Mommy get back to her breakfast?"

I nodded and gathered up the articles, went back to my room quietly like I was the loser of this odd philosophical skirmish. From then on she didn't take me out on any more mother-son bonding trips. Basically slathered all her attention on my sister, aside from handling my education and giving me the professional training I needed to take up the Capsule Corp mantle one day. That was her way of dealing with threats – infantilizing and ignoring them.

I came out of it feeling pretty good about myself, though perhaps I should have been more troubled. My father knew something was different, and I felt his approval like the accolades of a hard-won battle. I now had my own rule of sanity and coldness that I had tested and proven.

Most of the time, don't do anything unto others. When you're feeling selfish, do unto others what you want. Don't bother with guilt.


End file.
